In secret, her mom mailed her money every week. So did her dad. To an address here in the city. But they never saw the baby.
Guy 137 and Branch Bacardi just look at me. Guy 1 37 holding and petting his stuffed dog. Mr. Bacardi fiddling with the gold locket around his neck, rolling it between his thumb and gun finger.
"Parents," Mr. Bacardi says, "they'll screw you up every time."
This isn't a joke, I say. Porn babies, they're more than just the by-products of the sex industry. The leftover veal calves of adult entertainment. A spin-off product like new strains of hepatitis and herpes.
Guy 137 lifts his hand, wiggling the fingers in the air, until I stop talking.
"Hold on," he says. "I have to ask: what's an internal pop shot?"
I stare at him a beat.
Mr. Bacardi says, "I can take that one."
I nod my head for him to take over.
Branch Bacardi looks up and clears his throat. His voice flat and even, as if he were reading from a book, he says, "The male performer achieves orgasm inside the female performer, without wearing a condom. After he withdraws, the female performer contracts her pelvic floor with enough force to forcefully expel the ejaculate from her vaginal orifice."
Any color drains down from the 137 guy's face. Pale and wide-eyed, he says, "Hardly the best form of birth control…"
My point exactly.
But, Mr. Bacardi says, you can't wear condoms and expect your product to sell in Europe. His head still tilted back, he's looking at Snow Falling on Peters, where Cassie Wright is being marched at bayonet point and shipped off to a Japanese-American internment camp.
Still fingering the locket, Mr. Bacardi says, "She was so pretty…"
Guy 137 sighs, saying, "The face that caught a thousand facials."
My point is, these kids aren't a joke. Or an urban legend.
Another sprinkle of rose petals spiral to the floor.
Branch Bacardi says, "But can you name one?"
On the monitors, Cassie's embroidered silk kimono slides to the dusty floor of her barracks in the Nevada desert. In the background bubbles a hot tub overflowing with giggling women, their faces powdered white with rice flour. Pouring sake on each other's bare breasts. The internment-camp commandant walks into the barracks, carrying a coiled whip.
My roses are almost nothing left but stems and thorns.
The girl with the clipboard and stopwatch is walked all the way across the room, over next to the food. With my free hand, I wave for Mr. Bacardi and guy 137 to lean in closer. Keeping my voice lower than the noise of the whip cracking, I whisper.
Tapping the tip of my gun finger to my chest I mouth the word "Me."
I'm not a joke or a legend.
I am that porn baby.
11. Mr. 137
Wouldn't you know it? It's the damned shampoo. That "100 Strokes" crap Cassie Wright launched. So what if the bottle's the perfect shape for. But wash, rinse, and repeat for a couple days, and you'll go bald. All this damage just so maybe Miss Wright will smell it in my hair and consider it a compliment.
Not that she could smell anything. The place reeks like a stockyard.
Shaking his head, Branch Bacardi looks through the shifting herd of naked men. Pointing at actor 72, where he stands in a pool of white rose petals across the room, Bacardi says, "Dude there?" Bacardi says, "Little dude's a total boner-kill." The finger he's pointing, he turns that hand, cupped palm up, and Branch says, "Dude, spare me some wood?" Cupping his brown hand, the palm stained the same bronzer as the fingers, Bacardi shoves his hand at me. His brown eyes look at me. They look at his open hand. Look at me. Bacardi says, "A pill, dude?"
I tell him to take his own.
Shaking his head, Bacardi says, "Didn't bring none."
Shaking my head, I say I need my stash. The pill inside his pretty little heart-shaped girly-girl locket, I tell him. Bacardi should swallow that.
Touching the gold locket, where it rests between his shaved pecs, Branch lets his mouth crack open. His Adam's apple jumps with a swallow. Tapping the locket, Branch says, "Ain't that kind of pill." He says, "Dude."
Standing across the room, as far as he could walk without leaving the building, actor 72 stands, one hand rubbing the little silver cross that hangs from his neck chain. Rubbing the cross between his thumb and index finger. His green eyes looking everywhere but at Bacardi and me. The actor's other arm still cradles the bouquet of roses.
"Besides," Bacardi says, tapping the locket so hard his chest echoes with a deep, hollow thump, "this here's for a friend." He says, "I'm just safekeeping it."
He's Branch Bacardi, I tell him. He won't need some crutch to perform.
"You're Dan Banyan, dude," Bacardi says.
Was Dan Banyan, I tell him.
Actor 72, he drops his top-secret maternity bomb, then hangdogs it away from us, fast, his bare feet slapping the concrete floor. Stomping hard as anybody can against cold concrete, sprinkling rose petals every step.
"Banyan dude don't need pills," Bacardi says, his bronzer arm bent to keep that hand out, the bicep and triceps jumping inside his skin. Flexing and relaxing, his number «600» expanding and shrinking, his arm has a life of its own. Breathing. "Dude like Dan Banyan, private-detective dude, wasn't you, like, banging ten walk-ons every episode? Every babe client and witness and, like, lawyer," Bacardi says. "Dude's a babe meat grinder…"
Nodding after number 72, I say, "You have to admit, he does look like her."
Above the young man, the television hanging over his head shows Miss Wright's groundbreaking civil-rights statement about racism, the sexy comedy where a fresh-faced college sophomore comes home for Christmas and tells her doting parents that she's dating a chapter of the Black Panthers. It's called Guess Who's Coming at Dinner. Later re-released as Black Cock Down.
"Dude," Bacardi says, "I'll pay you, after." His hand out, he says, "Promise."
I put another pill between my lips, leaving one fewer in the bottle.
"Fifty bucks," Bacardi says. "Cash."
And I swallow. Nodding at number 72,I tell Bacardi, "That troubled young man looks a great deal like you also."
Bacardi looks. At the actor with his roses. Then at Miss Wright stretching her lips around a fat black erection. And he says, "Didn't happen."
Looking at the locket on his chest, the gold shining pink through a dried layer of his nipple blood, I say, "Just take your own pill."
"That's how come I'm in the business so long, dude," Bacardi says. "My whole life, I never shot nothing but blanks." Snapping his fingers at me, Bacardi says, "One pill and I'll sign your teddy bear you got."
Mr. Toto. The pen's still hooked behind one dog ear. I shrug, Sure. And I hand him over to Bacardi. The brown fingers take the canvas dog, and I wait.
Bacardi's eyes fixed on his writing, scratching the pen down the dog's canvas leg, Bacardi says, "You met Ivana Trump?" He looks up at me. "And Tina Louise? Like in Gilligan's Island?" He says, "What's she like?"
His teeth, those kind of too-white caps. The white of subway tiles and police cars. Public-bathroom white. The man by whom all other men have measured themselves for a generation. The biggest woodsman in porn.
I ask, Are you really sterile?
Bacardi holds Mr. Toto, turning the dog and looking from name to name. "Lizbeth Taylor," he reads. "Deborah Harry. Natalie Wood…" He hands the dog back, saying, "I'm impressed." Mr. Toto's canvas is smudged with bronzer, brown fingerprints. Bacardi's signature is a huge "B," a second huge "B," both letters trailing off into illegible black-ink scrawls.